‘It’s not like they say it is. Guns and bombs. It’s just people talking like this.’ It was two in the morning in a hotel in Novgorod, a town where Hitler had not left one residential house standing and, in the Middle Ages, where Theophanes the Greek, having left the companionship of the ikon maker Andrei Rublev in Moscow, had come to fill the walls of the many churches with frescos.
The young man, athletic-looking and contained as a circus acrobat, was wearing a sleeveless white vest. On his wrist a tattoo indicating the initials of Soviet Troops serving in Germany. His family, those who did not live in Italy and France, had been eliminated in the Armenian earthquake. He was a refugee here. Apart from having served in Germany, he’d been on the front in Afghanistan and that’s what he was referring to now.
‘The talking like this’ was people around us pouring Scotch whisky, Armenian cognac, Armenian brandy, down their mouths. At four in the morning he banged on my door, roubles in his outstretched hands. Did I have any drink? It was all gone, I pleaded. Anyway just then some rather hesitant-looking Soviet girls appeared at the top of the stairs to comfort him.
Next day in Café Posad in Novgorod, a basement, rouge-lit café, I listened to protest songs against the war in Afghanistan. A man and his wife hear their son is joining the army. Then they hear he’s being sent to Afghanistan. Then they hear he’s been killed. Men Who Dance the Disco, an Indian film, and Men From Outer Space, a Japanese film, were showing at the October Cinema. Outside it young people told me how they planned to fake medical certificates to avoid the war. Young people here guilefully protest and the authorities don’t seem to mind.
In Leningrad they smoke Ukrainian and Afghan hash in the streets, in little cars pulled up outside the teeming market on Kuznechnyy Lane, a market where the healing karina and boyjaryshnik berries are on sale in great mounds. One of these cars revved off while I was in it and ultimately, after a stop for a meal, brought me to a flat in the outskirts of Leningrad. The flat belonged to a professor but one of the group illegally rented a room in it. The bath was beside the kitchen sink. Ereni the Airedale ran riot.
The boy sub-let his room in the evenings to couples who wished to make love. We encountered one such couple. The girl was thrown out into the snow but the boy joined us to listen to Sting, ‘Moon Over Bourbon Street’, ‘Consider Me Gone’, under the Stars and Stripes of the ’76 Gasoline Company and to drink champagne we’d bought in the Metropole Restaurant where Rasputin had once dined, where waiters offer to sell you caviare from under their jackets or to change money, where women in fur hats rock and roll to ‘Rock Around the Clock’ or tango to Cole Porter’s ‘I’ll String Along With You’.
A buxom bag of hashish was taken out. A student at the Electro-Technical Institute talked about his pen-pal girlfriend whom he’d encountered on Nevsky Prospect when he’d tried to sell her caviare – Natasha, Russian descendant from Merthyr Tydfil.
Early next morning in a café, christened the Gastric Café because of the bad food, a girl told me a folk story, illustrating it all the time on napkins. ‘When becomes a spring there was born a farmer’s son.’ We said goodbye outside Café Saigon. I was going back to Moscow for Christmas Day, which in Russia is on 7 January.
Yelokhovsky Cathedral was crowded on Christmas Eve. Red carnations were everywhere pushed among bits of Christmas tree. Old women dipped to kiss an ikon showing the Adoration of the Magi. A pool of old women sang hymns before the same ikon, crossing themselves again and again and bowing their heads again and again. Two women haggled over candles, one pulling them off the stand when they were only half-depleted, the other grabbing them and putting them on again.
During the service itself the Patriarch of Moscow with his flowing snow beard stood directly in front of the crowd and blessed it. I was reminded of the blessing at Levin’s wedding in Anna Karenina: ‘They prayed that God would make them fruitful and bless them as he blessed Isaac and Rebecca, Joseph, Moses and Zipporah and that they might look upon their children’s children.’
I’d seen Tolstoy’s bicycle in a house near an outdoor heated swimming pool where you can swim with the snow falling on top of you, where men exercise on the ice at the sides, and where old women with fake pink roses in their bathing caps jump up and down in the water, beseeching the snow with outstretched, generally puny arms.
At the toll of New Year on Red Square a troupe of elderly male and female joggers had appeared from nowhere, some in fancy dress, and had jogged across the square, disappearing behind St Basil’s Cathedral. They do this every New Year, jogging from one end of Moscow to the other, magically appearing on Red Square at the stroke of midnight.
I’d said goodbye to the old year in my own way. The day before the Red Square celebrations I’d taken a train from Kiev Railway Station to visit the grave of Boris Pasternak. In Peredelkino, first watching children take rides on amusement swans and horses in an alcove of the station, watching boys elsewhere play games of Moscow boys – machines where you sink submarines with sudden illuminations of torpedoes.
Pasternak had stayed in Russia but at the grave in the expiring light of a year which in some ways had been the worst in my life, Christmas decorations on many of the graves, I was reminded of the words of someone who’d left Russia, Marc Chagall. ‘To preserve the earth in one’s roots or to rediscover other earth, that is a true miracle.’
There were many visual miracles in this country; young soldiers chewing tinsel like hay as they talk to you, a little boy holding a lighted candle over a book of hymns before the Magi Ikon in Yelokhovsky Cathedral, the successive flames of candles in glass cases containing bunches of red carnations along the snow-piled streets outside Kiev Railway Station.
And by Pasternak’s grave I was able to ponder for the first time an anecdote told to me by a vicar from Richmond just before our plane had landed in Russia, an anecdote which seemed to be at home here.
A few days before Christmas in England, late at night, a young man had knocked on the vicar’s door. He was a lance-corporal from Northern Ireland who’d deserted the day he discovered he had Aids. He’d been sleeping in Richmond Park, afraid to go to Dorset to reveal his double shame to his parents.
British Airways had played ‘There’s no Place Like Home at Christmas’ as the plane had touched down into the snow and forest-tapestries of Russia. On the other side of the airport barrier an old woman had waited with a bunch of red carnations.